6 ms·

Seems like a good way to avert a midlife crisis is to explicitly make helping others a non-trivial part of one's life. Focusing on effectiveness on helping othe

by yboris 4y ago

Seems like a good way to avert a midlife crisis is to explicitly make helping others a non-trivial part of one's life. Focusing on effectiveness on helping others is probably an important component as well. I recommend looking into Effective Altruism - "a philosophy and community focused on maximising the good you can do through your career, projects, and donations" https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ In my case I've joined Giving What We Can ten years ago - giving at least 10% of my income to cost-effective charities. No matter how badly my day goes, I can always reflect on how nice it is that through my donations thousands of individuals have benefited greatly.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
> Seems like a good way to avert a midlife crisis is to explicitly make helping others a non-trivial part of one's life. Given this is a thread about philosophy, and this looks like the sort of thing that sounds so true nobody bothers looking too closely at whether it is, I feel compelled to ask why it is so?
- strogonoff 4y ago
  To me it rings true from first principles that involving others in your life leads to higher satisfaction. If we assume as true that consciousness/self-awareness requires others to arise in the first place—that your own model of yourself is an outcome of modelling those around you (since that implies modelling their model of you)—then it seems not such a big leap to assume that taking others out of your life, becoming a leaf node in the network so to speak, would lead to various negative effects. Unfortunately, this is exactly what seems to happen to many people after a certain age threshold. As we become more self-sufficient, contacts become harder to initiate and sustain. Helping others, however, is increasingly more of an option as you gain age. Addendum: the above reasoning doesn’t directly address impersonal ways to help (e.g., through donations).
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    > If we assume as true that consciousness/self-awareness requires others to arise in the first place—that your own model of yourself is an outcome of modelling those around you (since that implies modelling their model of you)—then it seems not such a big leap to assume that taking others out of your life, becoming a leaf node in the network so to speak, would lead to various negative effects. I think this assumption needs further justification given that I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others, and there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware. I don't see an obvious link between these things.
    - strogonoff 4y ago
      If you reject the assumption that self-awareness is inherently social, then feel free to disagree. I guess I’m not actually arguing from first principles and we can’t properly get to the bottom of it here. > there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware I can’t speak for that. I don’t think this is a great example because they still exist in social context. > I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others We still exist over time, not discretely—if you are isolated, it doesn’t mean you lose consciousness immediately. However, I suspect that after a prolonged isolation from human contact (which would be a highly unethical experiment, of course) you’d likely exhibit behaviour consistent with waning self-awareness; and I would doubt that a human that is somehow (this is even more unethical) brought up in utter and total isolation could be considered conscious in any human sense of the word.
- arkaic 4y ago
  I wonder if mid life crises possible arise in part due to the lack of a legacy we leave behind, whether it's kids, works for future generations, art, etc, and even acts of altruism. Maybe doing selfless things can be just as strong a cure for the things you always wanted to do for yourself that you feel you haven't lived up to yet?
- HPsquared 4y ago
  It satisfies the "social chimp brain" that you are in good standing with the community.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    I would note that servants, butlers, cleaners, and the like who spend large chunks of their day serving others are generally not held in high regard by society. We even use community society as a punishment for criminals.
    - HPsquared 4y ago
      That's a job though, not altruism.
- yboris 4y ago
  There's a whole (relatively new) empirical study of happiness, called Positive Psychology, that's been ongoing for decades. The claim I made is broad, so it's not based on one experiment, but on numerous factors that point in the same direction. We are social creatures, and feeling like we are a part of a greater whole makes people happier. In the recent book Happy Money, the authors, two Ph.D. researchers in the area, describe experiments that indicate that spending money on others promotes happiness. Of the three components of Self-Determination Theory, one is "Relatedness", feeling connected with and caring others (contributing to a bigger whole). I'm happy to share more.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Even if what you say is true, I don't think it necessarily follows that this would prevent or mitigate a mid-life crisis. There are after all many things that can cause unhappiness.
    - yboris 4y ago
      I am willing to bet there's a lot of variation in "midlife crisis". I glanced at Wikipedia to see, and one of the possible sources seems to be when people reflect and realize they have not accomplished much. For all the things I've done that normal society considers "accomplishments" (learning to play piano, winning in competitive chess and sports, etc) none, I think, have been as good (for the world and long-term me) as the direct effects of my charitable donations to cost-effective charities. I'm 36 now, so maybe I'll have a midlife crisis in the future (I'm still young); even if I didn't have those accomplishment, I don't think I'll be able to wallow in "I've not accomplished much" when I know I prevented many many people from getting malaria (and all the negatives that accompany it). So I'm pretty sure that "mitigate" can happen, even if not "prevent". And the phrase you use "necessarily follows" might mean you're being rather stringent, but that seems to me too-high a filter to accept good advice ;)
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    Somehow, I am associating Self-Determination Theory with ACT -- acceptance and committment therapy. In any event, 'acceptance' and 'committment' appear pertinent to many comments here.
- alecbz 4y ago
  We're inherently very social creatures. I'm sure a lot's been written on this, but I like "The Social Leap"'s telling of it: we basically evolved from our primate ancestors by being pushed out of the rainforest into the Savannah. Our normal primate defense of climbing into trees was unavailable, and the way we found to survive was working together in groups. Years of evolution have wired into our brains that we're supposed to be interacting and working with others.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Even if this is true, what reason is there to think this is the cure for mid-life crisis?
    - alecbz 4y ago
      Ah sure, that's a broader claim and I think is less obviously true. In general, I think a lot of existential crises are caused by having some psychological need not met, and so making sure psychological needs are met seems like a reasonable approach for preventing/addressing them. Another part of this claim that's not super obvious to me is how/why _helping_ people specifically is important, as opposed other ways you can have people in your life.
implements 4y ago
This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Owe_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Owe_the_Future has been compared to your link, though I haven’t read it (it’s out Sept. 1st).
- yboris 4y ago
  The book is available now in the US: https://whatweowethefuture.com/ https://whatweowethefuture.com/ Received my copy in the mail yesterday :)
ccooffee 4y ago
I've done this for over a decade, and "Effective Altruism" does NOT prevent midlife crises. There's more nuance to it. (In my case, my day job that paid VERY well involved things that are very much against my ethics. Even giving away 20% of the money to good causes didn't stop the guilt. So now I'm "retired" but mostly just wallowing in guilt of enabling horrific things while lying to myself about "making the world better" on the fringes.)
- fizwhiz 4y ago
  Damn dude what did you do? Sell Ads to teens?
  - WJW 4y ago
    There's plenty of worse things you can do in eg the chemical industries or in public relations.
  - ccooffee 4y ago
    Worked for a large silicon valley company in the military-industrial space.
- havblue 4y ago
  I wonder some of the time what role self deception can play in finding meaning. If we only have so much agency to make a difference in the world, how much should we beat ourselves up over the inability to change it?
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I don't think that's a question of deception at all. Just measure yourself up against the amount of change that you can and want to have on the world. It's pretty simple. If you want to save or improve 10 lives, do that. It doesn't matter if there are millions of people still starving. You still made the incremental change that you wanted to
  - ccooffee 4y ago
ryandvm 4y ago
Averting the mid-life crisis is overrated. I'm 45. I'm at least halfway through my turn. I'm definitely feeling the mid-life blues. I wonder if I'm wasting my life slinging bits for companies that probably won't exist in 15 years. If I'm doing an acceptable job at raising my children. If I'm contributing usefully to humanity AT ALL. Pretty soon the merry-go-round is going to start spinning down for me and my utterly insignificant portion of the universal timeline is going to be over with. Christ, if that's not depressing, what is? No, I would suggest that if one never experiences the mid-life crisis then they aren't performing their philosophical due diligence. The trick is to not let it consume you and end up fucking up everything good in your life. Get depressed, re-evaluate your life, make some positive changes, stop obsessing with accumulating gewgaws, and start helping people - that's the good shit. What you don't want to do is quit your job, abandon your wife and kids, and run off to a polyamorous colony in Thailand. Otherwise, it may turn out that your purpose in life was to serve as a warning to others...

by yboris 4y ago

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> Seems like a good way to avert a midlife crisis is to explicitly make helping others a non-trivial part of one's life. Given this is a thread about philosophy, and this looks like the sort of thing that sounds so true nobody bothers looking too closely at whether it is, I feel compelled to ask why it is so?

strogonoff 4y ago
To me it rings true from first principles that involving others in your life leads to higher satisfaction. If we assume as true that consciousness/self-awareness requires others to arise in the first place—that your own model of yourself is an outcome of modelling those around you (since that implies modelling their model of you)—then it seems not such a big leap to assume that taking others out of your life, becoming a leaf node in the network so to speak, would lead to various negative effects. Unfortunately, this is exactly what seems to happen to many people after a certain age threshold. As we become more self-sufficient, contacts become harder to initiate and sustain. Helping others, however, is increasingly more of an option as you gain age. Addendum: the above reasoning doesn’t directly address impersonal ways to help (e.g., through donations).
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  > If we assume as true that consciousness/self-awareness requires others to arise in the first place—that your own model of yourself is an outcome of modelling those around you (since that implies modelling their model of you)—then it seems not such a big leap to assume that taking others out of your life, becoming a leaf node in the network so to speak, would lead to various negative effects. I think this assumption needs further justification given that I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others, and there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware. I don't see an obvious link between these things.
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    If you reject the assumption that self-awareness is inherently social, then feel free to disagree. I guess I’m not actually arguing from first principles and we can’t properly get to the bottom of it here. > there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware I can’t speak for that. I don’t think this is a great example because they still exist in social context. > I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others We still exist over time, not discretely—if you are isolated, it doesn’t mean you lose consciousness immediately. However, I suspect that after a prolonged isolation from human contact (which would be a highly unethical experiment, of course) you’d likely exhibit behaviour consistent with waning self-awareness; and I would doubt that a human that is somehow (this is even more unethical) brought up in utter and total isolation could be considered conscious in any human sense of the word.
arkaic 4y ago
I wonder if mid life crises possible arise in part due to the lack of a legacy we leave behind, whether it's kids, works for future generations, art, etc, and even acts of altruism. Maybe doing selfless things can be just as strong a cure for the things you always wanted to do for yourself that you feel you haven't lived up to yet?
HPsquared 4y ago
It satisfies the "social chimp brain" that you are in good standing with the community.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I would note that servants, butlers, cleaners, and the like who spend large chunks of their day serving others are generally not held in high regard by society. We even use community society as a punishment for criminals.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    That's a job though, not altruism.
yboris 4y ago
There's a whole (relatively new) empirical study of happiness, called Positive Psychology, that's been ongoing for decades. The claim I made is broad, so it's not based on one experiment, but on numerous factors that point in the same direction. We are social creatures, and feeling like we are a part of a greater whole makes people happier. In the recent book Happy Money, the authors, two Ph.D. researchers in the area, describe experiments that indicate that spending money on others promotes happiness. Of the three components of Self-Determination Theory, one is "Relatedness", feeling connected with and caring others (contributing to a bigger whole). I'm happy to share more.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Even if what you say is true, I don't think it necessarily follows that this would prevent or mitigate a mid-life crisis. There are after all many things that can cause unhappiness.
  - yboris 4y ago
    I am willing to bet there's a lot of variation in "midlife crisis". I glanced at Wikipedia to see, and one of the possible sources seems to be when people reflect and realize they have not accomplished much. For all the things I've done that normal society considers "accomplishments" (learning to play piano, winning in competitive chess and sports, etc) none, I think, have been as good (for the world and long-term me) as the direct effects of my charitable donations to cost-effective charities. I'm 36 now, so maybe I'll have a midlife crisis in the future (I'm still young); even if I didn't have those accomplishment, I don't think I'll be able to wallow in "I've not accomplished much" when I know I prevented many many people from getting malaria (and all the negatives that accompany it). So I'm pretty sure that "mitigate" can happen, even if not "prevent". And the phrase you use "necessarily follows" might mean you're being rather stringent, but that seems to me too-high a filter to accept good advice ;)
- a9h74j 4y ago
  Somehow, I am associating Self-Determination Theory with ACT -- acceptance and committment therapy. In any event, 'acceptance' and 'committment' appear pertinent to many comments here.
alecbz 4y ago
We're inherently very social creatures. I'm sure a lot's been written on this, but I like "The Social Leap"'s telling of it: we basically evolved from our primate ancestors by being pushed out of the rainforest into the Savannah. Our normal primate defense of climbing into trees was unavailable, and the way we found to survive was working together in groups. Years of evolution have wired into our brains that we're supposed to be interacting and working with others.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Even if this is true, what reason is there to think this is the cure for mid-life crisis?
  - alecbz 4y ago
    Ah sure, that's a broader claim and I think is less obviously true. In general, I think a lot of existential crises are caused by having some psychological need not met, and so making sure psychological needs are met seems like a reasonable approach for preventing/addressing them. Another part of this claim that's not super obvious to me is how/why _helping_ people specifically is important, as opposed other ways you can have people in your life.

implements 4y ago

This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Owe_the_Future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Owe_the_Future has been compared to your link, though I haven’t read it (it’s out Sept. 1st).

yboris 4y ago
The book is available now in the US: https://whatweowethefuture.com/ https://whatweowethefuture.com/ Received my copy in the mail yesterday :)

ccooffee 4y ago

I've done this for over a decade, and "Effective Altruism" does NOT prevent midlife crises. There's more nuance to it. (In my case, my day job that paid VERY well involved things that are very much against my ethics. Even giving away 20% of the money to good causes didn't stop the guilt. So now I'm "retired" but mostly just wallowing in guilt of enabling horrific things while lying to myself about "making the world better" on the fringes.)

fizwhiz 4y ago
Damn dude what did you do? Sell Ads to teens?
- WJW 4y ago
  There's plenty of worse things you can do in eg the chemical industries or in public relations.
- ccooffee 4y ago
  Worked for a large silicon valley company in the military-industrial space.
havblue 4y ago
I wonder some of the time what role self deception can play in finding meaning. If we only have so much agency to make a difference in the world, how much should we beat ourselves up over the inability to change it?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I don't think that's a question of deception at all. Just measure yourself up against the amount of change that you can and want to have on the world. It's pretty simple. If you want to save or improve 10 lives, do that. It doesn't matter if there are millions of people still starving. You still made the incremental change that you wanted to
- ccooffee 4y ago

ryandvm 4y ago

Averting the mid-life crisis is overrated. I'm 45. I'm at least halfway through my turn. I'm definitely feeling the mid-life blues. I wonder if I'm wasting my life slinging bits for companies that probably won't exist in 15 years. If I'm doing an acceptable job at raising my children. If I'm contributing usefully to humanity AT ALL. Pretty soon the merry-go-round is going to start spinning down for me and my utterly insignificant portion of the universal timeline is going to be over with. Christ, if that's not depressing, what is? No, I would suggest that if one never experiences the mid-life crisis then they aren't performing their philosophical due diligence. The trick is to not let it consume you and end up fucking up everything good in your life. Get depressed, re-evaluate your life, make some positive changes, stop obsessing with accumulating gewgaws, and start helping people - that's the good shit. What you don't want to do is quit your job, abandon your wife and kids, and run off to a polyamorous colony in Thailand. Otherwise, it may turn out that your purpose in life was to serve as a warning to others...